The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

The fklc

Poster

The Brighter Side of Existentialism

A short story by Albert Jones to be read on Thursday night at the Riverpark Theatre on the river.
7 p.m.Picnic lunch, bring the kids. Then watch the moon come up while listening to the rocking and fun sounds of Texa till midnight.

As always, absolutely free.

Everything ever almost sent

Everything ever almost sent
by Albert Jones
-stories-

Albert

First of all, I’m tired of thinking about the art of writing as important. It is not important. It is pain. It is not to be striven after.
I am not a good writer and no longer wish to be one. I do however desire to be a truthful writer. Therefore, from this moment, the aspiring writer in me dies. I am re-born as a man with a different mission, other than the one who puts down for others the best combination of words.
The trouble with writing is that I never have anybody to write towards or to. This makes the act too solitary and slightly ridiculous if you think about it since at an acorn level I already know the entire unwritten story. It is in my latent emotions. Perhaps my very genes.
Bringing it to fruition is for you, gentle reader, and I’ve lived long enough to know that most don’t read anymore. I don’t know you and if I did I don’t think our communication gulf would be bridged by any attempt at words. I won’t slave for you and if I want money I’ll get a job. So why does my desire to write continue?
I sit without an audience wearing a label I placed upon myself years ago: writer. I am, by all accounts, a failed one at that. And yet I find there is some reason to write each next word. As if the words will take me to where I want to go. As if I know where there is to go. I think I know now that each next word is there only for itself. Each one is a particular designation, a pointing finger, a chalice holding truth. Each encapsulates in some way the untouchable essence of often distant emotions. Words en masse form landscapes of soul, thousands upon thousands of symbols forming mood and sometimes knowledge. The landscape is of the inner world. I am a child crying to be allowed to cry.
In the solitary place of writing, the inner moonscape where neighbors don’t exist, friendless is taken for given, cognizance of death is as common as that of life. All moments are as if listening to themselves. I sit waiting for realization, no longer expecting the almighty dollar for my efforts, believing that if there is a God he pays the writer in full at the time of creation.

And there is nothing to hold and say “Here It Is!” All attempts at grasping fade. Each emotive high an illusion. The words down, but the eyes again ever wandering for more of something not yet named. The bane of the writer: always wanting more. No outside world sways me. No inside world is believed in by a “single other human being.” We saddle our minds to ride, but are bucked. Our unities fall away dismembered and we see no reason to piece them back together again since we’d already seen them and taken note. That is what we do best: take note. But then the pain becomes real again because we didn’t “know” what we’d “seen.” The emptiness, the “void” becomes real again. We begin to write around everything that we thought we’d attempted to write about before. We write around everything which we believe is not yet born. With words whose meanings we barely know and we hope or we pray. Some believe writing is prayer. Maybe.
Some believe writing is a hope for dreams to become reality. This is obviously true. But we shouldn’t hope too hard for then we break into the worlds where we do not belong. Imagine a ship leaving a harbor with nobody aboard but never stopping. We can ride that ship in our imagination, lose ourselves to the swaying of the seas until when land appears again we do not know how to use our feet to walk upon it. We write, instead, in order to leave that ship, in order to grow up. We need out of the prisons of our hopes. We don’t want words. We want keys to open doors. We only use words. We seek to understand each word, but we want even more to know the world which the word suggests to us. We want golden palaces in the ether. We want blue air beneath us. We want dolphins and adventure and the forgetting of needing to use words as surrogates for our lives.